anameforobsidian

No update might be better than the last fig update. I'm being serious. The first campaign was full of interesting mini-articles from people on the team about plans for the game. The whole campaign feels kinda pro forma compared to the first. We'll see though.

Not really. Either stage directions or different font would do the trick.

Warlock wouldn't match the setting. There's no evidence of other realms, and no evidence of non-constructed intelligences without a physical presence. Animancer on the other hand.... Also, there are a couple other ways to divide classes. One is Melee vs. Ranged. I know Pillars blurs the lines but: Priests, Rangers, and Ciphers are predominantly ranged, with specialized melee builds. Wizards and Druids favor ranged, but have melee abilities. Rogues and Chanters favor melee, but have ranged abilities. Paladins, Monks, Barbs and Fighters are almost purely melee. That suggests room for another ranged character. Another is by team function: tank, healer, striker, controller, buffs, debuffs, summoner. Of course these are arbitrary, so you can combine or add jobs. Looking at these jobs there are a lot of tanks, controllers, strikers, and debuffers. There are less buffers, healers, and summoners in that order. By this metric, if there is a hole, it's for something like WoW's shaman.

I don't like the idea of all classes having power pools. One of the great strengths of Pillars is how unique the classes are, the resources for each class are part of what makes them unique.

I'm not a fan of full voice-over. I don't like what it does to the editing and npc creation process. Content has to be locked in earlier to give time to the voice studio. This means less time for revision, and revision leads to better dialogue. The only way around that is the horrible Mass Effect system where text says one thing, voice says another. The dissonance is really bad there. Also, I really don't like how voice makes text more expensive. I think by commodifying text, you end up with spare writing.

Also worth pointing out that it's significantly different doing a non-combat level as a single character rather than a party.

They can kill you in the case of the lift, or ruin the quest in the case of the egg. That's hardly tiny.

Is this a good thing? I can see two sides: Good: It could be that it isn't that big of a change. After all, abilities were use limited in the original Pillars. This another type of limit. Balancing could be easier. It might be easier to read the UI with multiclasses. Bad: It could hurt class variety to have all of them using a resource. Are ranged rogues and rangers going to feel similar because you have to take the exact same considerations in combat? It could move classes away from their original core design. Fighters were designed to be low maintenance does adding an automatic active resource change the build to make active abilities more attractive? Bond is a really stupid name for a power-source. Will this combined with the lack of dailies encourage rote behavior? In general though, I never found this to be a big issue. I caused the change.

The Good: Communication, especially from Feargus. They were out there and I would not be surprised if he wrote 500+ replies. The art. Aloth in the sand was especially impressive, but the art in general. The fig process. It works about as well as kickstarter. Multiclass & Kits. It'll be a lot of systems work, but it will be interesting too. Kits themselves are probably more interesting than new classes would have been unless someone had an exceptionally strong class idea. Acknowledging mistakes from the first one and saying that they've already fixed some of them in the new game. The tech updates in general. They were incredibly clear about systems changes; I don't love all of them but I do respect the transparency. The Bad: Stretchgoals. Enough wrong here to make a mini-section They were prepped for stretchgoals this time, but the stretchgoals were stuff they were already doing. Yeah sure, you magically found a way to do portraits for every character in two days. Puh-leeze. Stretchgoals nobody asked for. Berath's Blessing and Double VO in particular. The community seems to take a slightly negative stance towards spending extra on VO in particular. General lack of enthusiasm towards stretchgoals. Ydwin and the Intelligent Weapon were particularly unethusiastic. They were boring enough that they went back on the announcement of a stretchgoal because it was tame. Sawyer was significantly less involved in the campaign. No new godlikes or setting appropriate subraces. Come on. NWN 2 added how many with each expansion? Fulvano's voyage. It lacked the creativity and spontaneity of the Endless Paths and was clearly content limited. The last one had a cool enough design that it provided the villain for the Pillars 2. The Splintered Reef was the only really cool looking location. Paypal not being set up beforehand. They should have known to do that from their experience with the Pillars 1 Kickstarter. Didn't paypal add 100k? The Ugly: Is Ydwin a Yandere or Tsundere thread got 8 pages, and she's not even considered a full companion.

It has an *illusion* of sense, until you realize that the world they created is actually aiming for high realism in the renaissance setting. That's one reason this soul-based stats stick out like a sore thumb. For example, why would body size matter for a character's might, and thus his ability to perform feats of strength? If Might if the property of the soul and not the body, then an Ogre shouldn't necessarily be any stronger than an orlan with a strong soul, which would mean that ogres should've effectively gone extinct long ago due to not having any real benefits for their larger bodies. If the metaphysical reality is more important than the physical reality, why do people even bother with technology? The soul-stat-system makes zero sense in the context of the world they created and it breaks the immersion, it doesn't add to it. Three things: Isn't there already a thread on stats? Physics still works in this world. Metaphysics just also work. Strong souls in general are fairly rare, and get increasingly so as time passes.

I quite enjoy the stat system. Attack speed is a goddamn mess, and the game should be better about telling players to stop building tanks. I have only one change to recommend. Reverse the names for might and intellect. Have huge, long-lasting spells sounds like more of a might thing. And it would make sense that high int mages know how to hit where it hurts. It would improve role-playing for the people who can't get around the idea that super-powered warriors might not be powered by muscles alone; it would let simplistic players who expect mages to be teh best at everything experience high damage rates without getting muscle in their wizard. And everyone could go back to arguing about romances or not enough items or how engagement is ruining America.

The Twin Elms content is better than the vast majority of Defiance Bay Content. By that time you're normally level-capped, and there's not a ton of loot that makes it worthwhile to get there, and the dungeons have the same fights over and over. But you still have some of the best quests in the vanilla game, one of which leads to a very interesting ending slide where your choice is acknowledged (and carries over into the next game).

I really hope they look at this list many of the forumites came up with names far better than what they used in the video. Thanks for all the hard work!

Here's my reasoning for Inquisitor as Priest / Cipher. Ciphers are already in lore as detectives. Inquisitors are like holy detectives (with torture); hence the word inquiry. A paladin / priest would be a martial priest with extra zeal. Inquisitors while possessed of extra zeal are not very martial figures. In English Lit it's always Torquemada twirling his mustache or the devious traps. I chose Bishop for this, but Crusader or Cleric are probably better options. Inquisitor literally means questioner, and cipher is a secret or code. I think there's a nice wordplay here, where the inquisitor is seeking the truth by breaking codes. For instance, an inquisitor would be a great name for a priest of Wael / cipher.

Why not a mystical piece of the Black Isle?

Are there are more in the new game now that you have more time and resources?

Pillars of Eternity: Tactics? I'd back that I think. Hell, I'd love a single player Pillars Tactics game. Something like Ogre Tactics with multiple parties moving in the world to accomplish strategic objectives.

NWN has live realms I'm pretty sure you could do that there.

BG can have a lot of micro if you play it like a Moba player. That's what Sensuki does. That said, if Pillars had a default level up ability that chose low maintenance abilities, that would probably help a lot of people out.

The new enchanting system will create a greater onus on Obsidian to provide loot that each player considers meaningful. Interesting weapons could quite possibly fall by the wayside as we level out of them. I'd be okay with limiting lashes, and drastically reducing the amount of enchanting material available. Unless Obsidian is very careful it will end up drastically limiting potential build variety. This might not affect me as a consumer of their product; I'm not terribly cautious builder. However it will affect me as an Obsidian fan, because the most prolific, interesting, and thoughtful forum members will be negatively affected. The most interesting content on the forum was in the build-guide section for half-a-year if not longer. This will translate into less visits, meaning less excitement, meaning less free advertising from me. That's not a threat or whine, just a statement of fact; the forums get near-dead and grogs keep them alive. The other likely alternative is that Obsidian splurges on weapons, and you're picking up magic **** left and right, making loot feel less meaningful.

I'm not saying this to be edgy, but if you're tank n' spanking Pillars you're doing it wrong. The only fights that's really applicable to are the dragons. The vast majority of other fights favor armored or semi-armored damage dealers. Sure casters can play master blaster, but status spells like Gaze of the Adragan are far more powerful than pew-pew spells like Minoletta's Precisely Piercing Burst. I'm not saying 3 front 3 back is a bad formation, but 3 tanks in the front is a bad party build. And Tyranny wasn't just derided for the ease of combat; it took several hits in professional reviews for how rote combat was. That's either bad system or encounter design.

Camp supplies beat the **** out of random encounters, and time limits take the fun out of open-world games. I really think it's a fairly elegant solution. The only problem I see with them is the dissonance between stash and camp supply mechanics. That could be better solved by having a Torchlight 2 style animal messenger, or limiting stash access to certain times.

I had a rambling list of suggestions, so I'll shorten it down to this. Obsidian's future success lies in the niche that really appreciates them. Reuse resources and let story-tellers pursue passion projects. One of them is more likely to break out than a company risking large bet on the mainstream.

I absolutely like support the health system the way it was. But I see some people denying that the complaints even exist. I've also heard a lot of these health system complaints. A lot. The six most common complaints have been: health camping supplies too much to keep track of / too confusing wizards aren't better than everyone else loot being too samey No romances I disagree with each and every one of these, but it's noticeable that this is what they've worked on changing for Pillars 2. Injuries instead of health. No more cast per day, instead do a hidden cast per day by using replenishing resources like Grimoires. Smaller parties. Unified status effect system with counters (this way they can mollify the BG2 style spell-counter spell crowd, and separate them from the quadratic wizard crowd) Limited thematic enchantments, soul-bounds Ew. Of the changes they made, health is likely the worst. Unified statuses will probably be an improvement. I can see how hidden dailies and enchantments could work out. The five man party may be ok, and romances are skippable. What makes the decision for health so galling is that JE Sawyer is going against his own instincts as a designer. He said something like "I thought it was fine but other people complained." Health & Resting was one of the few areas that Pillars had a step forward from the Infinity Engine games. The gameplay pushed you harder, didn't let you tank grind through bosses, and led to some great fights where your characters were too beat up to be healed any more. In BG, the most sensible path was to play supernova all the time, and then clicked the rest button until the monsters let you sleep (gaining some small xp and loot in the process). If they change the health system to just injuries, they'll loose a lot of those edge cases. I also suspect players will complain more, because they'll keep playing through injuries and then feel like there wasn't enough warning when a character dies.

1. Content modding, and generally a less "baked in" approach. How hard would it be to add NPCs to a scene? If it is as hard as they make it sound, that sounds like a serious problem with the content creation process in general. Pillars 1 would be much improved if we could add NPCs to the base game or edit dialogue. I can see how quests would be harder, but still. 2. This is my number 2 wish. I would love to see a Vithrak, Xaurip, Delemgan, or Naga companion. Think about the options: A cave-in separated a lost Vithrak explorer from her people. She seeks to explore more before coming back. Lil' Stabby just follows you around after you feed him. His sidequest has you find out that he compulsively steals and hoards stuff in a pile in your stronghold. Every now and then you catch him stealing, and can choose to let it happen or not. A poor Delemgan was taken away from her home in a cage, and lost her memories of the way home in the delirium that followed. The group that abducted her just dumper her on the side of the road when they thought she would die. She's hoping you can help her find her way home. A coral Naga really loves the taste of coral. He loves it so much his tribe kicked him out. He wants help getting back, so he can steal and eat their statue of Ondra. 3. Slower exp option. You zoom through the early levels so quickly. I personally find early play fun, because the danger and limited resources add to the risk/reward excitement of exploring. 4. Remove expert mode. A lot of the features, like casting without markers, don't fit PE. The option is in there, but the mechanics aren't designed so it's any fun.